Richly footnoted and fully indexed, the book still manages to read much like an adventure story, as David Horowitz carried on his crusade virtually alone and armed only with the truth. (Watch Glenn Reynold's PJTV interview with Horowitz.)

The array of organizations that did battle with Mr. Horowitz (usually in vicious, demeaning, and Der Sturmer-like terms) reads like the who’s who of American university life. This is not unimportant. As a 30-year member of the Biblical Archeology Society, I have long understood the radical leftism (and often anti-Israeli nature) of the American Historical Association. Thanks to Mr. Horowitz, anyone reading their contribution to the debate the “Academic Bill of Rights” engendered will be more quickly educated.

In time it becomes amazing who rose up against a perfectly sane, logical, and reasonable attempt to establish the most gentle guidelines designed to minimally protect the diversity of opinion on our campuses: the ACLU, the AAUP, the ACE, the AFT — almost as many alphabet agencies as the New Deal.

Richly footnoted and fully indexed, Reforming Our Universities still manages to read much like an adventure story. It is well worth the candle.

27 Comments, 15 Threads

1.
tommy gunn

I look forward to reading this book however it will be a difficult job. Reforming education is the big picture with the university merely a subset of this larger problem of liberalism dominating all aspects of the educational establishment. Getting rid of federal involvement is key to reform. Look at what Obama has done to the universities. He took over the student loan program in order to exert massive influence over students and universities AND to give him a safe haven when he comes to red states. We need to get rid of the department of education, take these resources and put them back to the states. Elimiinate tenure, establish merit hiring and promoting standards, make teacher compensation and retirement comparable to the private sector and get rid of useless morons in educational administrations. If you do the above reforms, there is less liklihood of ending up with universities that behave like zombies and thought policemen.

Somehow, this country was sold on the liberal view that everybody had to go to college, whether or not they deserved to be there. We ended up graduating a lot of people with useless Liberal Arts degrees, people who would have been better off joining the work force at an earlier age rather than collecting a lot of debt from huge student loans.

There are plenty of people who should be in college, but there has been little effort in this country to also offer high school graduates other options, such as going to trade schools or working as apprentices in various professions. Making matters worse, the cost for getting these college degrees has also skyrocketed, making the return on the investment somewhat negligible.

In short, I think we have way too many lawyers in this country and not enough plumbers, carpenters, and electricians. At least that’s what it seems like in my state of New Jersey. But you get my point. We are cranking out way too many of the elite class nurtured in the liberal arts, which means precious little in business, and we are ignoring real world skills that are needed to literally build a nation.

My thanks to you, liberty, lionel, david. The time has come to right the ship.(excuse the pun) The new awakening of pride in craft must be nurtured by those blessed with creative hands as well as those with extraordinarily creative minds.

The number one University for total lack of “diversity”…? The most oppressive, uber politically correct institution of “learning” in the entire United States….? A place that makes Berkeley look like a hotbed of conservatism??

I give you, and hope you will take it THE University of Michigan! What once was a great school years ago…has descended into such a liberal leftist hell hole that it is an embarrassment to all alumni…pre 1970 alumni that is.

As a retired now member of this “academic” world I can offer firsthand testimony on the issue. But first, let me point out that the way to change this virtual “world” of academia is by forcing changes through pressure put on the Board of Directors/Regents (in public institutions, usually political appointees – from the Governor of the State) and above all through their Allumni and Endowment Associations.

Now on the root causes of the issue: American Academia, especially since WWII, has been dominated (although not exclusively so) by an atheist liberal (often radical) jewish sub-culture. If one wants to examine the roots of the issue, one must admit that “political correctness” has prevented so far the detailed examination of the profound impact that this sub-culture has had on educating the Nation’s professional and intellectual elites over the past at least sixty years. Of course false “anti-semitism” has been the adjective behind this evading of the issue. As false “racism” is behind the avoidance of criticizing BHO now.

Repeal affirmative action laws, end tuition grants and loans except for military service, and privatize the so-called public universities. That is what will do the job. Codes of conduct will not work. Relentless market pressure is the only method that will break the cycle of leftist control of academia. Disintermediation is our weapon of choice. The web is our technology. The unions will be broken when their institutions gold-plated pensions bankrupt their universities. This time, we must not step in as with Chrysler and GM – bankruptcy, reorganization and out go the unions. That which cannot continue, will not. And government pensions cannot go on. Time is on our side.

I am my college professor’s favorite pupil. He calls himself a “philosophical progressive” (whatever that means) and he tells wonderful stories about Mao Zedong and how deeply spirtual it is to become a Progressive. He told us not to pay any attention to those horrible rumors that the Conservatives preach to us about Brother Mao’s murder of 60 million. I know it’s a lie, that’s what a girl on Facebook said. After all, President Obama had a Mao ornamate hanging fron the White House Christmas tree, right on cool. After learning all of these new political ideas, I went out and got the latest Che Guevara t-shirt. It is so rad. My professor went to Harvard like Obama did so I know he loves Che too. My professor said Hollywood helped to revive another leftist martyr but my uncle (who was in the Army) said Hollywood has dutifully churned out yet another cinematic agitprop paean and that I should read to try to discern why many supposedly democratic, civil libertarian liberals still swoon over this Stalinist mass-murderer. What ever that means, later dude.

Since law school (lots and lots of reading), followed by brain surgery (who knows what they might have removed?!), I’ve had a hard time reading “real” books through to the end. It could also be because there’s so darned much available on the internet, which I never seem to tire of. Whatever, I could make an exception for this one.

My son, who is a student at UCLA, tells me that there is a quiet conservative backlash going on at his school. Students there are sick and tired of the PC positions of the leftist agendas. Anything the left wants is PC or so portrayed. Students openly question the dogmas they are presented with.
One example is how the Moslems on campus are being treated. Up to now anything the Moslems on campus did was holy, students are openly rebelling about the preferentially treatment given to this vocal hostile minority. The other day the Moslems openly rioted on campus, a quietly kept secret. The rest of the student body, which is more interested in academic survival, really resented the disruption and the destruction of their lives and property. Arrests were made. By the way, reason for the riot was the cancellation of Mideast Studies as a Masters level degree. The University found that the major was irrelevant and unnecessary. Now all these post graduate students, Moslems mainly, might have to find a real major. They no longer will have the soft easy major to keep them in school. This is welcomed by the student body.
Other forms of students rebelling against the left’s agenda are avoidance of left wing Professors, and not spitting out the dogma in the Moaist Red Book tradition. Students are daring to voice their opinions openly; however, they have to cite sources to back their opinions. This in itself is better than one ever expected. It means that students are researching conservative points of view. All be it, this is done very carefully as if stepping on some old mine field because it risks the grade you dearly want and need.
Tough economic times also make the University value the paying student much more than before. Before students without resources were given every advantage possible. This took money out of the University’s coffers. This money is no longer available and programs are being cut. This means that a inner city student with a 3.2 GPA is no longer on even par with another who has a 4.0 and struggled to get into the school.
(Let me be specific here because I’m not a racist. If the inner city student has a GPA of 4.0 like the rest of the student body has to enter, everything should be in place to help him/her be a part of the University and I would hope that those programs aren’t cut.)

That’s pretty exciting news, actually. I’m not surprised that it’s not being reported by the MFM, but I haven’t even seen it on Fox News! What’s THAT about?! Taking a back seat to the current election news?

1. I don’t know about “MidEast Studies”, but a quick look at the UCLA website shows that UCLA has a thriving “Near Eastern Languages and Cultures” Dept. with at least 30 faculty members and what looks like at least 50 graduate students. It offers both the MA and PhD degrees. See it at:

2. In addition, UCLA also has an “Islamic Studies” program. This is not exactly a “department” as such but rather an “interdepartamental program”. But it also offers an MA and PhD in the field. See it at:

3. I noticed that there is another “interdepartamental program” called “Middle Eastern and North African Studies” which only offers the BA degree. Perhaps this is what you were referring to.

This is a “general purpose” major designed for people who may end up living/working in the Middle East and want some formal background training in the area but don’t necessarily want to “specialize” in the field.

But it never was designed for “graduate” studies. If you were really interested in the field as an ACADEMIC field, you could always continue for the MA and PhD in the 2 programs listed above.

So why students would “riot” over this, I don’t know. If you want to study Arabic, Islam and so on, it’s still all right there and has been ever since the 1950s.

You might be interested to know that the Berkeley College Republicans are the biggest student group at Berkeley. “Students” at Cal periodically have these “walkouts” to protest one thing or another. You can always figure out who is “protesting”. The liberal arts majors, “Studies” majors, etc are always out there, but if you go to the Computer Science, Engineering, various science or math classes, everyone is there and classes are going on normaly. It was the same way when I was in grad school at Cal in the 80s.

Poetry and Art and Religion have to apologize to no one. Liberal Arts are, and always have been, the center of University life.
Students in Padua in 1350 or Cambridge in 1650 or Yale in 1950 were
studying Theology, and Literature and Philosophy and building a civilization on what
they knew. Science, Engineering, Physics and Economics are the tools to that end, not the end in itself. There were plenty of brillant scientists
in the Soviet Union and all their decades of work ended up tossed on
a colossal junk pile because that society was built on fraudulent ideas.
The science was fine, but science is never enough, nor is it ever the really
deciding factor of a societies worth or survivability. So, if you want to criticize the Liberal Arts in the University today..you need to go back and find just where they went off the tracks. The expansion of Cultural Marxism
in the 70s and 80s i is a good place to start. So too is the expansion of the number of students attending University. 100 years ago 4% of the population attended, todayits 40%. The vast majority of those now attending simply do not belong in University. There is simply not enough brains to go around. But the Teaching
profession and Administrator salaries, demand lots of tuition paying students and so to accomodate the dull, the incurious, the self absorped, the self victimized, the modern
University invented dozens of bogus majors. Womens Studies, Black Studies,
Colonial Studies, Gay Studies. It this trendy garbage which needs to be jettisoned. But Philosophy, Literature, History, have always been at the heart of the University, however vapid todays study of those subjects may be.

You’re correct: a great university must have a great humanities program, one that provides excellent history, literature, and languages for its students.

And you’re also correct that the humanities programs on offer throughout the university world are intellectual slums. OK, there are quite little beams of light in places like Hillsdale College.

And really, I have no idea how this can be changed. The humanities have been so thoroughly trashed in the past couple of generations that I wonder if there are any great intellects remaining on campus?

The key to education reform was published on Oct 5 in this WSJ article:

This article appeared on-line on Oct 5, 2010. The URL for the article is
online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704631

How Handwriting Trains the Brain
Forming Letters Is Key to Learning, Memory, Ideas
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By GWENDOLYN BOUNDS
Ask preschooler Zane Pike to write his name or the alphabet, then watch this 4-year-old’s stubborn side kick in. He spurns practice at school and tosses aside workbooks at home. But Angie Pike, Zane’s mom, persists, believing that handwriting is a building block to learning.

Wendy Bounds discusses the fading art of handwriting, pointing out that new research shows it can benefit children’s motor skills and their ability to compose ideas and achieve goals throughout life.

She’s right. Using advanced tools such as magnetic resonance imaging, researchers are finding that writing by hand is more than just a way to communicate. The practice helps with learning letters and shapes, can improve idea composition and expression, and may aid fine motor-skill development.

It’s not just children who benefit. Adults studying new symbols, such as Chinese characters, might enhance recognition by writing the characters by hand, researchers say. Some physicians say handwriting could be a good cognitive exercise for baby boomers working to keep their minds sharp as they age.

Studies suggest there’s real value in learning and maintaining this ancient skill, even as we increasingly communicate electronically via keyboards big and small. Indeed, technology often gets blamed for handwriting’s demise. But in an interesting twist, new software for touch-screen devices, such as the iPad, is starting to reinvigorate the practice.

View Full Image

Angie Pike
Four-year-old Zane Pike used to toss aside his handwriting books. Now, the Cabot, Ark., preschooler is learning to write his letters using a smartphone application.

Most schools still include conventional handwriting instruction in their primary-grade curriculum, but today that amounts to just over an hour a week, according to Zaner-Bloser Inc., one of the nation’s largest handwriting-curriculum publishers. Even at institutions that make it a strong priority, such as the private Brearley School in New York City, “some parents say, ‘I can’t believe you are wasting a minute on this,’” says Linda Boldt, the school’s head of learning skills.

Recent research illustrates how writing by hand engages the brain in learning. During one study at Indiana University published this year, researchers invited children to man a “spaceship,” actually an MRI machine using a specialized scan called “functional” MRI that spots neural activity in the brain. The kids were shown letters before and after receiving different letter-learning instruction. In children who had practiced printing by hand, the neural activity was far more enhanced and “adult-like” than in those who had simply looked at letters.

“It seems there is something really important about manually manipulating and drawing out two-dimensional things we see all the time,” says Karin Harman James, assistant professor of psychology and neuroscience at Indiana University who led the study.

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The Juggle: In Digital Age, Does Handwriting Still Matter?

Adults may benefit similarly when learning a new graphically different language, such as Mandarin, or symbol systems for mathematics, music and chemistry, Dr. James says. For instance, in a 2008 study in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, adults were asked to distinguish between new characters and a mirror image of them after producing the characters using pen-and-paper writing and a computer keyboard. The result: For those writing by hand, there was stronger and longer-lasting recognition of the characters’ proper orientation, suggesting that the specific movements memorized when learning how to write aided the visual identification of graphic shapes.

Other research highlights the hand’s unique relationship with the brain when it comes to composing thoughts and ideas. Virginia Berninger, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Washington, says handwriting differs from typing because it requires executing sequential strokes to form a letter, whereas keyboarding involves selecting a whole letter by touching a key.

She says pictures of the brain have illustrated that sequential finger movements activated massive regions involved in thinking, language and working memory—the system for temporarily storing and managing information.

And one recent study of hers demonstrated that in grades two, four and six, children wrote more words, faster, and expressed more ideas when writing essays by hand versus with a keyboard.

View Full Image

AJ Mast for the Wall Street Journal
For research at Indiana University, children undergo specialized MRI brain scans that spot neurological activity.

Even in the digital age, people remain enthralled by handwriting for myriad reasons—the intimacy implied by a loved one’s script, or what the slant and shape of letters might reveal about personality. During actress Lindsay Lohan’s probation violation court appearance this summer, a swarm of handwriting experts proffered analysis of her blocky courtroom scribbling. “Projecting a false image” and “crossing boundaries,” concluded two on celebrity news and entertainment site hollywoodlife.com. Beyond identifying personality traits through handwriting, called graphology, some doctors treating neurological disorders say handwriting can be an early diagnostic tool.

“Some patients bring in journals from the years, and you can see dramatic change from when they were 55 and doing fine and now at 70,” says P. Murali Doraiswamy, a neuroscientist at Duke University. “As more people lose writing skills and migrate to the computer, retraining people in handwriting skills could be a useful cognitive exercise.”

In high schools, where laptops are increasingly used, handwriting still matters. In the essay section of SAT college-entrance exams, scorers unable to read a student’s writing can assign that portion an “illegible” score of 0.

Even legible handwriting that’s messy can have its own ramifications, says Steve Graham, professor of education at Vanderbilt University. He cites several studies indicating that good handwriting can take a generic classroom test score from the 50th percentile to the 84th percentile, while bad penmanship could tank it to the 16th. “There is a reader effect that is insidious,” Dr. Graham says. “People judge the quality of your ideas based on your handwriting.”

Handwriting-curriculum creators say they’re seeing renewed interest among parents looking to hone older children’s skills—or even their own penmanship. Nan Barchowsky, who developed the Barchowsky Fluent Handwriting method to ease transition from print-script to joined cursive letters, says she’s sold more than 1,500 copies of “Fix It … Write” in the past year.

Some high-tech allies also are giving the practice an unexpected boost through hand-held gadgets like smartphones and tablets. Dan Feather, a graphic designer and computer consultant in Nashville, Tenn., says he’s “never adapted well to the keypads on little devices.” Instead, he uses a $3.99 application called “WritePad” on his iPhone. It accepts handwriting input with a finger or stylus, then converts it to text for email, documents or Twitter updates.

And apps are helping Zane Pike—the 4-year-old who refused to practice his letters. The Cabot, Ark., boy won’t put down his mom’s iPhone, where she’s downloaded a $1.99 app called “abc PocketPhonics.” The program instructs Zane to draw letters with his finger or a stylus; correct movements earn him cheering pencils.

Indiana University
In children who had practiced writing by hand, the scans showed heightened brain activity in a key area, circled on the image at right, indicating learning took place.

“He thinks it’s a game,” says Angie Pike.

Similarly, kindergartners at Harford Day School in Bel Air, Md., are taught to write on paper but recently also began tracing letter shapes on the screen of an iPad using a handwriting app.

“Children will be using technology unlike I did, and it’s important for teachers to be familiar with it,” says Kay Crocker, the school’s lead kindergarten teacher. Regardless of the input method, she says, “You still need to be able to write, and someone needs to be able to read it.”

The more Big Gov’t we have, the more Smart People we need to run the Big Bureaucracies, and tell other people how to live better, more smartly!

The Left, and too many similarly ‘superior’ Reps, makes a fetish out of being smart because they want more smart philosopher kings.

Having better post-graduation tests would be big help — to reduce the dependence on grades. It would also help if employers of new graduates wanted more evidence of actual diversity, especially being able to articulate both sides of an argument with the strongest argument on each side. But most hiring orgs want a smart person who will fit in! And lack of diversity is fine for fitting into a corp culture, to replace the university culture.

Small gov’t, lower taxes — none need be a genius to know that free people can run their own lives better than even a genius king can do so.

Where in the US Constitution is there any authorization for spending tax money on education at any level? What authorizes the federal government to make, or guarantee, student loans, or to grant money to colleges and universities? I can’t seem to find any clauses in there that would allow the federal goverment to do that. Hmm, that’s funny!

Come to think of it, why are alumni continuing to donate their hard-earned money to colleges and universities that flout the ideals that many of these same alumni have fought for?